A colleague from the good ol' days on Bougainville, who eventually put down roots in the USA, some time ago emailed me the scanned image of a postcard I had mailed him from Mackay in 1980. On the back I had written:
"Journey's End! We've settled in Mackay. A comfortable small town, beautiful beaches, National Parks, a booming sugar and tourist industry to supply the necessary dollar, who wants to go anywhere else, especially overseas?"
Famous last words! Two years later, I was also working in Saudi Arabia, but not before I had also worked in Brisbane, (again) on Bougainville Island, in Melbourne, in Townsville, and then (again) in Port Moresby.
I don't know if I sent him a postcard from Townsville, but if I had it may well have read the same as the Mackay postcard because I really liked that small house on the beach which I had bought and in which I felt as comfortable as in an old pair of slippers with holes in them. Then, eight months later, came the fatal phone call: did I want to be part of the big Ok Tedi mining job in New Guinea? Once more, the call of the wild!
So it was back to New Guinea and then on to Saudi Arabia, and finally Greece. Three years later I was back in Townsville but the magic of just walking in and picking up from where I had left off had deserted me.
I have since reflected many times on the many places I have lived and worked in, and wondered what life might be like if I had stayed on. What if I had stayed in New Guinea - no, not in today's New Guinea! - or in Burma or Samoa or Malaysia, or in Greece, or even on tiny Thursday Island? Plenty of what-ifs with absolutely no time left to act on them.
"Sitzfleisch" is a German word for being able to endure a lengthy or boring task. Some people are natural sitters. I am not. I have always needed that rush of adrenalin that comes with the excitement of a challenging job. Once completed, I would hand it over to a natural sitter and move on again. Not anymore. Forty years later, I've finally grown enough "Sitzfleisch" to do the same thing in the same place.
Journey's End indeed!
